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KMK Audio Chooses Avid VENUE | S6L For Dancing With The Stars

Los Angeles production company upgrades from Profile to support the increasing channel counts for latest season.

Avid announces that KMK Audio has chosen dual Avid VENUE | S6L systems to meet the music and monitor mixing needs of the upcoming 26th season of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars for the show’s mission-critical broadcast workflow.

J. Mark King, freelance audio mixer and co-owner of KMK Audio, and his business partner Butch McKarge have been using Avid VENUE live sound mixing systems to mix the music for Dancing with the Stars for eight years. While they were happy with their Avid VENUE | Profile system, they needed to upgrade to support the increasing channel counts required by the show.

They needed a system that would be compatible with their existing show files and decided to invest in two Avid VENUE | S6L systems, purchasing them through Jan Landy at SoundBroker.com.

“Mark and Butch were originally just looking to upgrade their main broadcast console, but once they took delivery of the system and had a chance to dive into the workflows and hear the difference in sound quality, it was a no-brainer to upgrade the monitor position as well,” explains Landy.

“I have a lot of show files and snapshots from the Profile and I knew that I could save a lot of time and trouble transferring EQs, gain structure and other settings to the S6L, as opposed to starting from scratch,” says King.

He was also impressed with the sonic benefits of S6L’s new preamp design, 96kHz sample rate, and 64-bit plugin processing. “With the S6L, there’s a warmth there that’s different from the Profile. It’s certainly punchy too – the sound is really exceptional. I also think there’s an important ‘bang for the buck’ aspect of VENUE—both the Profile and now the new S6L—that’s very attractive. You get an awful lot for your money.”

King mixes all the on-stage instruments for Dancing with the Stars from a customized trailer outside the studio and feeds his mix into the network’s broadcast mix. King also uses Pro Tools extensively for recording and Virtual Soundcheck. He records and mixes the band rehearsals, providing the resulting mix to the show’s producers for sign off, and to the dancers to rehearse with before their final performance. King also plays the multi-track Pro Tools recordings back through the Avid VENUE | S6L in Virtual Soundcheck mode and refines their mixes offline.

“In rehearsal, we record multi-tracks on Pro Tools,” says King. “When we’re done with rehearsal, I switch over to Virtual Soundcheck and I do all of my fine tuning to those songs. Every song has its own snapshot so that when we go live again it will come back a much tighter mix than when we started. It’s really vital.”

Avid VENUE | S6L is a fully modular, flexible live sound mixing system for a range of live sound mixing applications, including front of house, monitor, broadcast, theater, and more, with more than 300 processing channels.

“Jan was, and still is, absolutely essential to not only our purchase of the S6L, but also our continued success due to his first-class customer service,” King explains. “He could have simply sold us the gear and been done, but instead, he jumped right in and helped us pull everything together to be ready for the next season.”

Avid recently announced a number of new system components at the 2018 NAB and Prolight + Sound shows. The expanded Avid VENUE | S6L family now includes five different control surfaces, three processing engines and a range of four I/O racks, with 100% software, hardware, and show file compatibility across all system components.

Avid

KMK Audio

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